My Kitty's New Name: Ashley Madison (True Confession: My Cat was a Slut)

This is not my actual cat, but it's a pretty good likeness of her after she got caught in my brother's shower.

My poor cat, whom my brother and I took in when she was lingering around our condo complex last year, has had so many name changes that she's either becoming schizophrenic or developing dissociative personality disorder. I gave her a couple decent names at first -- Monica Lewinski and Camilla Parker-Bowles, to name a couple -- until my brother started calling her by the name of whatever girl he most recently dated, which changed about every two-and-a-half days or so.

You can, however, put your mind at ease. My brother and I are no longer guilty of cat cruelty of the psychological kind. We've chosen a name for our cat, to which we have both pledged to stick.  From this point forward, our cat shall be known as Ashley Madison.

It's a nice name.

Seriously, am I the only person on this continent with an IQ over 70 and a working computer who didn't know that the Ashley Madison affair site existed? Do I study so much and am I up to my neck in diapers to the degree that pop culture is passing me by? Is Ashley Madison already the answer to  a Trivial Pursuit  (Edition God- Knows-What?) question?

My brother says people who have to pay to have affairs are lame.  While I think my brother would probably do well to cut back a bit in that department and that he should internalize the idea that he doesn't have to sleep with every female in every year of our medical program in addition to every female faculty member under thirty-five (I'm exaggerating slightly) in order to be granted a medical degree (then again, maybe that's how he passes his classes), I also think he's onto something in terms of online affair sites.

I have issues on principle with the idea of marital infidelity, but even if I didn't, I'd think it was only ever justifiable if it were something that inadvertantly happened and not something one deliberately sought to do, but then, what do I know? Maybe half the married adult population is signed up with Ashley Madison or similar sites.

Where my cat is concerned, the name probably fits. I didn't mention this before because I didn't want everyone to think I'm a terrible person, but my cat was knocked up with what the vet said was her first litter when we got her. She had a hysterectomy before the kittens were full term. Yup; that's right. My cat was a slut who had an abortion. I did discuss the issue with a priest. He said that terminating the pregnancy would only be a sin if the cat had made her First Holy Communion. She obviously had not. She's never even been baptized unless one counts the time she was in my brother's shower and he didn't know it, and he turned on the water before getting in.